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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. Focused on the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate fate, this tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdoms gives us one of the most riveting characters in twentieth-century American fiction.
Current Favourite Novel
| Customer Rating:  | I'm a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor so when someone asked me to name my favourite novel I picked a little bit-of-a-book and said "Wise Blood".
Partly because the characters are, if not wholly understood, at least wholly familiar. Despite growing up around an assortment of Evangelicals and Foundation types I managed for the most part to maintain a pretty superficial view of them. Things like snake handling and female oppression were odd but ordinary and because of this ordinary I never spent too much time thinking about the misguided spirituality that a lot of it sat upon. Through a glass darkly, and all that.
Mostly, I'm moved to recommend Wise Blood again and again because it's such a brilliantly layered and grotesque comedy with powerful and appealing themes of integrity, the disaffected young and redemption. It's just one of those books you never really walk away from. Not really.
And that's a good thing.
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"Stop one minute to listen to the truth because you may never hear it again."
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I enjoy a lot of Irish writers and even though I have known the name Flannery O'Connor for a long time,this is the first time I have actually read this author. I ,like others ,assumed Flannery was a man and Irish.Before reading this novel,I checked the Amazon customer reviews and was completely surprised . Then, with some research on the net, that Flannery was a young woman of only 27 when she wrote this book,and rather than being Irish,was from an Old Deep South Catholic family,born in Savannah,Georgia. She was born in 1925,surrounded by poor whites in a Protestant area,left home at 18,graduated from college,wrote mainly Southern Gothic short stories,only 2 novels.She had a great interest in domestic birds,peacocks,pheasants,swans,geese,chickens and Moscovy Ducks. After college she lived on a family farm with her mother,outside Millidville Georgia.She was also a good painter. She was quite frail,never married,like her father,she contacted Lupus and died very young at only 39,in 1964. Her mother outlived her for many years. It is still possible to visit the farm in Millidville,Ga.She had a deep and knowledgeable faith.
As I read this book ,I was continually reminded of other writers such as James Joyce,Erskine Caldwell,Faulkner,Erskine Caldwell,Steinbeck and even some of those bible -thumping movies such as Elmer Gantry.
This is all about having or not having faith. O'Connor understands the difference between Faith and Religion and shows what a difficult thing it can be when someone lacks real faith and attempts to develop one's own through rationalization.Flannery does not make any attempt to preach or conince the reader one way or the other about faith,but she does an admiral job of showing how difficult and all encompassing it can be for some people who have doubts and try to resolve them.
While Flannery's life was all too short ;and we are all the poorer for that;she is remembered by words like these;
"Everything that rises must converge."
"Grace changes us and change is painful."
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Anyone Who Had a Heart
| Customer Rating: | | This novel combines startling images and an inscrutable Old Testament sensibility with funny scenes that will make you laugh out loud. It is the novel that helped cement Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation. She's a writer who will be part of the canon in a hundred years -- people will still be reading and discussing her. "Wise Blood" is the story of Hazel Motes, a man determine to strip Christ out of his life and out of the world, but, who, paradoxically, is also obsessed with Him. A walk through a haunted yet still good world filled with men who are made into monkeys, workaday street preachers, broke down autos, this is a kaleidoscope of sense, doubts, guilt, and humor: a must read tour de force. |
Wiser to Not Read This Novel
| Customer Rating:  | I read a lot of books and am fond of many Southern authors, including the late Ms. O'Connor. I really enjoyed her wonderfully titled "A Hard Man is a Good Find" (Note: A fine birthday gift for my grumbling gorilla of a wife; inscription: "I told you so!") and I like the author's ability to make the grotesque humorous.
Unfortunately, this novel is a complete failure with very little to laugh about. It's a pretty meaningless story with virtually no plot: nutty war veteran returns to empty home town, goes to another town, preaches nonsense, acts like the nutjob he is, meets some other worthless characters, does nutty things in an effort to find redemption (an idiot's path, mind you), etc. This supposedly funny novel with a point (often my very favorite genre) fails to elicit more than a single laugh (the scene with the Gonga the Gorilla was pretty darn funny--pointless, but funny) and the point about redemptive suffering (if that was even the point) struck this reader as ridiculously rendered.
All the characters are lunatics and there's absolutely nothing driving this book to conclusion, other than the turn of the page. This novel has been highly recommended by people who tend to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, I put it on the short list of books I've actually finished that I wish I'd never started. Not her best effort and one of the worst novels I've ever read. HHD>. |
Grotesque Comedy
| Customer Rating: | Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has sometimes been described as dark comedy, sometimes simply as satire. Whichever description I eventually decide suits it best, this grotesque 1952 first novel is so disturbing that its characters and their fates will stay with me for a long time.
Haze Motes, recently released from the army after suffering a wound in Korea, returns to his home state of Tennessee where he finds himself, much to his irritation, taken for a preacher by many of the strangers whom he meets. This is an easy mistake to make since Motes has recently exchanged his uniform for the type of suit and hat commonly worn by preachers of the time and the fact that he carries himself like, and has many of the mannerisms and attitudes of, his grandfather, a onetime country preacher himself. But Motes is angered by the very idea of being mistaken for a preacher because he is repelled by the whole concept of Christianity.
After encountering a street preacher, and being disgusted by what he saw and heard, Hazel Motes founds his Church Without Christ, a church based on realism, one in which the blind do not see, the deaf do not hear, the lame do not walk, and the dead remain dead. Not too surprisingly, Haze's message attracts to him the kind of people who either become obsessed with his message or want to turn the Church Without Christ into a vehicle to put easy money into their pockets. There are Enoch Emery, an 18-year old so lonely in the big city that he sees the new church and its preacher as essential to his survival, Sabbath Lily a 15-year old abandoned by her charlatan preacher father, Asa Hawkes, and who sets out to seduce Motes, Hoover Shoates who hires his own false prophet and starts a rival church, and the landlady who decides to marry Motes in order to share his monthly government check.
Flannery O'Connor's writing seldom, if ever, provides the reader with anything like a "happy ending" and Wise Blood, her first novel, is no exception. It is filled with characters who focus exclusively on self-gratification and who are not the least concerned about what they have to say or do in order to get what they want from those who have it. Even the minor characters, in particular the police, are not to be trusted as Motes so painfully discovers near the end of the book. But along the way, O'Connor provides memorable scenes that reflect her sense of humor and irony. I won't soon forget the images of the small, newspaper-wrapped mummy being rapidly carried through the rainy streets after being stolen from a museum nor the man in the gorilla suit who terrified the couple in the woods with whom he only wanted to shake hands.
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